The New Position of the United States Federal Government on Anthropogenic CO2

May 11, 2018 – The picture above may come from Australia where demonstrators protested their government’s climate change policies, but it represents equally the current position of the U.S. Trump administration. Climate change has vanished from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency. Climate change has been wiped from the latest Pentagon risk assessments. And now NASA’s research that tracks greenhouse gases around the world is no longer to be funded.

The remote monitoring of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been an important tool for scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change. Called the Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), it tracked CO2 pollution flows from space. And now its $10 million annual budget is gone.

CMS didn’t just look at CO2 pollution sources. The project’s objectives included:

• the use of the full range of NASA satellite observations, modeling/analysis capabilities, and commercial off-the-shelf technologies to establish the accuracy, quantitative uncertainties, and utility of products for supporting national and international policy, regulatory, and management activities related to anthropogenic carbon sources.
• the development of Carbon Monitoring Reporting and Verification systems to provide transparent, precise and accurate data to help with the design of carbon trading protocols.
• the enhancement of the science built around studying atmospheric carbon flows and processes.
• the creation of products and reports to inform policy developers and planners.
• contributing to the United States’ commitment to its international obligations related to carbon emissions.
• tracking the effectiveness of natural carbon sinks such as forests, tropical rainforests, oceans and freshwater, agricultural land, and soils.

Now says Kelly Sims Gallagher, Professor of Environmental Science at Tufts University, “if you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement.” By agreement, Gallagher is referring to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.

With CMS no longer funded, the ability to track flows of carbon over land and ocean is severely diminished. The website lists 13 new publications for 2018. But these appear to the be the last unless private individuals through crowdfunding and donations choose to help revive the project much in the way the Australia Climate Council operates today as a counterweight to its governments climate science denial agenda.

Who is left to continue to do the job with NASA excised from carbon monitoring? Currently, we have a single European carbon-monitoring satellite aloft. The European Space Agency is likely to build more now with NASA dropping out. States Woods Hole Research Center President, Phil Duffy, “we really shoot ourselves in the foot if we let other people develop the technology.”

A quick postscript:

That $10 million that was used by CMS is in play at NASA these days. That’s the exact amount that the new budget includes for hunting aliens. It seems far more worthwhile, don’t you think, to be looking for extraterrestrials than monitoring the health of the atmosphere of our planet. Enough said.